“I’m not morbid, Jason, just fascinated. I like it for its honesty. It doesn’t pretend to permanence as Egypt did with the pyramids, and Rome did and even still does with the Vatican, promising something eternal as if there were such a thing. The Cape tells the truth: It is not permanent, as nothing is permanent. It is changing, as everything is changing. That’s not disturbing—actually there’s great harmony and beauty in it. What I couldn’t face would be some promise of everlastingness in a universe that shows us the dishonesty of such a notion.”

But when they got back to the house, Jason paused in the front yard at the ghostly trunk and said, “Here is one change I really regret. This was a magnificent tree when I was a boy, and Tim and I climbed it, sat in it, swung from it, made it our own. Now it’s gone.”

As he spoke of the tree, Tina remembered other homes, trees, people of her own life. But the sadness and despair of a few years before was gone; she finally felt at peace, accepting it all.

“That’s what makes me wonder about Weezy,” she said thoughtfully, “she’s so dogmatic. She seems to be stuck on the present, assuming that the world is finished but it all went wrong and so she’s got to wreck it in order to start again. Basically she’s anarchic, because she can’t believe in the future. Yet it’s all ongoing change—all she has to do is wait and see.”

Tina’s room had a handsome maple bed with a fishnet canopy and a cross-and-crown coverlet that was old and faded and beautiful. At the foot of the bed stood an old sea-chest used by a Jowers sea-captain on some trip to the ends of the earth. There were hooked and braided rugs on the floor and a child’s Chippendale chair by the fireplace. The room was papered in a reproduction of an early style. Everything was right. It was the equivalent of the fine Italian hand among the old families of the Veneto. Both were seafaring families, both had accumulated wealth and possessions and pride; but her father’s family had been on the decline since the First World War and their possessions decimated, the style become faintly seedy. The Jowers family, however, were still enjoying their New World vigor.

And yet, Tina thought as she went to bed in that room, isn’t it strange to realize that both places are doomed to vanish. First Venice will disappear beneath the waters of the lagoon; and long after, but still inevitably, the Cape, too, will erode and go back to its beginnings at the ocean floor.